Here’s your marketing strategy game plan

The House
How to handle growth
4 min readDec 14, 2017

The first steps

If you’re just getting started, a checklist of the first couple of steps you need to take can do wonders for keeping you organized and on schedule.

Draft your Value Proposition

You can’t craft an effective marketing initiative without understanding what it is you are offering and why. Value Propositions are a simple and visually clear way to understand your customers needs, which will lead you to designing products and services they want. It allows you to match your products and services to realistic market needs.

Create customer segments

The first condition of nailing down a solid marketing strategy is understanding who you’re trying to sell to. Customer segmentation, the practice of dividing your customer base into groups of individuals that are similar in specific ways such as age, gender, interests and spending habits, can help you predict the needs and expectations of the different groups your trying to market to.

Define acquisition channels

Another imperative element of a good marketing strategy is an understanding of how you will reach your desired audience. Your options are practically endless: SEO, SEM, Facebook Ads, content marketing, affiliates, partnerships, email marketing, app stores, etc. However, picking the right channels can be the difference between wasting money and tapping into the right audience.

Build relationships

It is also really important that you understand how you will keep your customers once they have completed their initial purchase. Figuring out a retention program through things like customer loyalty and brand loyalty initiatives, will help you keep as many customers as possible coming back.

Planning details

Once you’ve established the basic requirements for a successful marketing strategy, it’s time to figure out the details that will make all the difference.

Plan using templates

At this stage it is vital to understand specific goals and to be able to experiment with different options and versions of your initial plans. Use checklists, templates and other tools to push the process along and use concrete data to support every decision at this stage.

Create a schedule

Another crucial element is understanding how to plan and adapt within a set time-frame. To keep things from getting out of hand and dragging on (and thus losing you money), set schedules for every phase of planning and execution and do your best to stick to it.

Prioritize

It is also essential that you understand which of your tasks are the most important to complete. To make sure everything is ticking along, your to-do list should be in an order defined both by importance and the schedule you have set for every phase of your project.

Preparing for launch

At this point, while you’re planning for and anticipating your launch, your focus should be on setting clear goals for the launch, as well as specifying aspects of your plan that can be improved.

Set your goals

Before you launch it is important that you define tangible goals and targets in terms of things like profit, reach, revenue and other metrics that are imperative to the success of your product or service.

Identify opportunities using SWOT analysis

Identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your project or business venture, as a part of a structured planning method. The SWOT analysis method involves specifying the objectives of your business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieve that objective.

Prepare the ground

Make sure everything is ready for the launch of your venture. This includes double checking if the right marketing tools are in place, if everything will be carried out within your set budget, if resources have been allocated correctly, etc.

Review your plan

Lastly, you need to make an assessment of every element of the plan that you have crafted so far and see which points can be polished and improved. Try to foresee the bottlenecks and other less-than-ideal situations that can arise with your current plan in place and try to figure out solutions.

For more useful information on all aspects of marketing and product development, follow us on Twitter or check out our website.

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The House
How to handle growth

We are The House, a digital branding and marketing agency. We believe in business as unusual, thinking differently to help you grow.